


The Cinders, The Violets, and the Gooseberries

by junkshopdisco



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Chocolat AU, F/M, M/M, chocolate wizard merlin, travel writer Gwaine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 21:29:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10625496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junkshopdisco/pseuds/junkshopdisco
Summary: As a travel writer, Gwaine has developed a gift for summing up towns in 500 words, but Camelot and its chocolatier won’t stay out of his notebook, even when he’s supposed to have left the place behind.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Dwaine Quest. Based on the film _Chocolat_. Merlin opens a (magical?) chocolate shop and Gwaine is the newcomer to the town that falls in love with the chocolate - and with Merlin. Having seen _Chocolat_ probably not necessary to follow.

_It’s been decades since savvy travellers cared about searching out Albion’s sweetest spot, but risk the plunge down steep cobbled streets – and the suspicious sideways glances of some of the locals – and on the bank of a river stolen from storybooks you’ll find it: Camelot._

_Nestled in a natural gulley where willows stroke shore and rooftop alike, this once-thriving town now usually only calls to those seeking welcome because they’ve broken down. Fewer than a thousand residents mean that here, backpackers are unlikely to go unnoticed, but if you can stand the gawking the reward is a world the mobile mast is yet to puncture._

_Make the most of the serenity by staying on a quaint, floral-patterned narrowboat. Draw the nets and let the waves lull you to sleep, or lounge under the sunshine on the roof watching the day slip by. If you’re not sure of your sea legs, check-in to a room above Freya’s – a dusky-stone bar, where the fixtures and fittings are mismatched but repaired with love, and the toasted sandwiches stave off even the most ravenous of hungers._

_When you fancy a tipple, the whiskey comes – somewhat ironically – from the Pendragon Distillery. Having founded the town and built themselves a castle in medieval times, the Pendragons ushered in a reign of prohibition and austerity, hints of which can still be seen as women scurry to church wearing pillbox hats and children hide their comics from the vicar inside dog-eared hymn books. The castle itself – once the grandest in Albion – now sits in the shabby shadows of the forest like a stalwart gent that refuses to acknowledge his diminished status. The organised tour is a melancholy affair: limp, rusted armour and threadbare tapestries speak tomes about the sadness of power faded to grey, the two surviving members of the dynasty – Arthur and Morgana – presiding over affairs in the town hall and the aforementioned distillery respectively (the locals will happily detail their many feuds over a drop of the latter’s finest, assuming the former is out of earshot)._

_Camelot’s real draw these days is its market square, bordered on all sides by artisan foodie emporiums where the décor is as delightful as the fare. The charcuterie proudly displays meats cooked and smoked to ancient recipes which are guarded by pitchfork mob, and a truckle-stop at the cheesemonger will see you stagger out weighed down by stilton with a name like Bishop’s Revenge and a jar of chutney with a hand-drawn label you’re not entirely sure you paid for. Amongst them is a chocolaterie with an unprepossessing red sign, which hides a temple devoted to all-things sweet. Inside, the owner guesses everyone’s favourite as if by magic; closing time comes with much ganaching of teeth, but he can often be persuaded to share the skills of his trade behind locked doors._

_Albion has fallen out of favour as a destination on most people’s grand tour, but those weary of the tourist trail would be wise to reconsider, because when it comes to tranquillity topped liberally with charm, Camelot might have a rival, but she would probably win in a duel._

From two towns away in an internet café with orange walls and criminally uncomfortable seating, Gwaine files the piece with his editor, alongside a short and hopefully humorous guide to gnome-hunting in Wroclaw and an article on the Albanian Riviera, complete with anecdote about why sampling the firewater is a bad idea if you plan to swim to one of the dropped-from-heaven islands off the coast of Sarandë. Capturing a place in 500 words is his gift; for the first time ever it feels like a curse that he never stays anywhere sufficiently long to learn enough to warrant a novel.

*

The drift of days happens as it always does, on trains where the rattling window invites him to make himself a pillow and the landscape somehow takes the shape of his thoughts. They stray to the shop with the unprepossessing red sign and push the door. Inside, there’s a man at the counter spinning a plate, asking a white-haired gent to peer into it, and offering him peppermint drops with the words:

“Trust me, Gaius. They’re just what you need.”

Gwaine watches him in the reflections that are strewn across jars of chilli flakes, rainbow sprinkles, and flecks of lavender. Chatter falls from the man utterly without pretension as he extols the virtue of this syrup from the foothills of the Andes or that cream from a village where the cows eat nothing but hops. He halts when he sees Gwaine and smiles a smile that has no salesman in it. The old man looks between them.

“I should be going. See you tomorrow, Merlin,” he says. “Be good, girls.” 

Gwaine follows his gaze to a girl chattering to herself in the window: maybe six years old, pale, fragile, hair as dark as a bird’s eye falling all the way down her back. He looks for another, but there’s no one there. 

On his way out, the old man squeezes Gwaine’s arm, and leans in. 

“Merlin’s about to ask if he can try and guess your favourite. You should let him.”

The bell above the door bids the man farewell, and Gwaine writes the line in his head: _in the market square there’s a chocolate shop where your secret penchant for cherries and dark chocolate is apparently up for grabs._

“Game?” Merlin says. 

“Always,” Gwaine says, and goes over to the counter. “Party trick?”

“It’s no trick. What do you see?” he says, spinning the plate into a blur.

Gwaine plays along, squinting into it, surprised when the nothing-y swirl suddenly takes a form behind his eyes. 

“A – deer,” Gwaine says. “No, a doe – and a forest. She looks sad. Lonely, I’d wager.”

“Ah.”

Merlin’s fingers trip along the dark, glossy wood of the shelf, and he eases down a jar half-filled with nuggets of rich brown. He lifts the lid and holds it out, releasing a waft of something sharp, burnt, and familiar. Gwaine sticks his hand inside and pulls out a chunk to bite. It bursts into sharp little holes on his tongue; soft bitterness and crystalline sweet melt into each other and prickle his lips.

“Cinder toffee,” Gwaine says. “I haven’t had that since I was a lad. I used to – ”

“Steal it, I bet, when the fair was in town, because you couldn’t afford it, but couldn’t resist.”

“How did you – ” Gwaine goes to laugh, but it turns into a baffled shake of his head. “No-one but my mother and this craggy old priest she hauled me in front of to confess know about that.”

“Secret’s safe with me.” Gwaine’s gaze fixes on Merlin’s face, trying to work out if it fits somewhere in a memory, because there’s something of the puzzle piece about him, like Gwaine’s suddenly found the corner around which everything else can now arrange into a picture. Merlin swallows, cheeks pinking to raspberry sherbet. He settles his fingers around the jar, toying with the mousetrap-catch on the lid. “Did I get it right?”

“That I liked it enough to risk eternal damnation? Yeah, that’s a fair cop. That it’s my favourite? Sorry, but no.”

“Damn. Staying long? I’d like to try again.”

‘Yes, I’m buying a houseboat,’ almost trips off Gwaine’s tongue, and he imagines himself following it with, ‘can you recommend somewhere to eat? Actually, maybe you just should come with me. I’ve a terrible sense of direction – you wouldn’t want me to get lost on the way, would you?’

“No. I’m a travel writer,” he says, and one of Merlin’s eyebrows quirks, like it’s not what he expected, but it pleases him. “I breeze through and then leave before people get sick of me.”

“I better have another go while I can, then,” Merlin says, and spins the plate, beckoning for him to lean in.

*

Gwaine drops off the train and falls into a hotel on the coast, where the furniture is shaped from driftwood and every room has a cake stand bearing biscuits made by the owner’s mother. Their chocolate chips turn to chalk in Gwaine’s mouth. Probably for the best – he’s off to a restaurant tonight, not for the food but for the cellar: a fabulous grey stone grotto with a history of femme fatales and dastardly dandies as long as its cocktail list.

The stars come up above the horizon and he realises he’s forgotten to move. _Google and cobble it_ , he thinks, and flops down on the bed – king size, well sprung, patchwork quilt a nice touch, if you like the feel of home sweet home from home. He digs out a notebook – a gift from a lover whose name he’s forgotten – William Morris orange grove design on the front and a yellow ribbon bookmark saving his place. Instead of recording what he usually does – town, region, date, and quirky details to sprinkle delicately on prose – he writes: 

_The night we met, I stayed up until four, writing what I’d say at your funeral in my head. Why would I do that, think in elegies about someone whose life I’d barely brushed? Was it just the cinder toffee, the creep of my past up the back of my neck, the minuscule, unshakeable conviction you knew everything I’d ever done and minded it less than you should? ~~It should have been wildly disconcerting, the pull towards a trajectory that had us tethered together already. It wasn’t. I wanted to run right into a future that had no base on which to exist.~~_

*

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you – I couldn’t sleep. Light was on, so I thought something might be amiss.”

It’s a lie, but he can hardly say: _I was trying to walk thoughts of you off, and then there you were lit up like a beacon, and I realised if I’d succeeded I’d be bereft without you in my head._ Framed by the shop, Merlin smiles, even though his heart must still be clamouring with surprise from Gwaine’s tap on the window. 

“Very chivalrous, but nothing’s wrong – it’s the mayor’s birthday. I’m making his favourites.” Merlin frowns, and scrubs a finger over his forehead leaving a little smudge of cocoa. “Or the ones which would be his favourites if he’d ever allow himself something indulgent. Hates alcohol, hates chocolate – the vices of the weak, he calls them.”

“You talking about Arthur Pendragon? He does look a sourpuss in his portrait.”

“You took the castle tour?”

“Worth every penny,” Gwaine says, “but only because I can claim it back as expenses.”

Merlin sniggers, and Gwaine eyes the shelves. In the incipient light before sunrise, candied chestnuts glint inside bottles, the sugar on vivid orange, green, purple, red, and yellow jellied fruit twinkles, and the chocolates in the display case line up on parade. All of them mingle into a vista as beautiful as any glittering sunrise over water, and the smell coils between intoxicating sweetness and just a nip of spice he can’t quite place.

“How do you make all this stuff?” he says.

“Practice. Been doing it all my life. Want to see?”

“I don’t want to interrupt if you’re busy.”

“I could do with a hand, actually.”

Merlin leads him through the shop to the kitchen. A butler sink brims with steel trays, rolling pins, and culinary paraphernalia Gwaine hasn’t a clue about the word for, but the heart of the room – a long, thin, wooden table with a pattern of tree rings – is pristine. Three bowls line up like impeccably-trained dogs – one filled with a gloopy, glossy black-brown almost-dough, another filled with chocolate shavings, a third with tiny glittering crystals of gold, like titbits of pale amber. 

“What are we making?”

“Truffles. My mother’s recipe with a slight tweak.”

Merlin hands Gwaine a pair of teaspoons, grabs two of his own from a drawer. Without a word he guides Gwaine through the whole thing: carving out just the right amount of filling from the first bowl; making a rough ball of it using the spoons; finishing it with a quick roll in his palm; dipping it, sticky, into the shavings and then pressing the shards of gold into its top like a crown. Gwaine’s first attempt is more of a squoval than the perfect sphere Merlin produces, but the smile of approval warms him right through. 

By the time the sun peeks in through the window, the table bears a regiment of truffles, and their creators are hip to hip, at ease in each other’s space. Gwaine’s about to say something, ask him to dinner, perhaps, when the girl from the window runs down the stairs, barefoot. She stops abruptly – hovers on her toes, nightdress swinging, eyes wide and very, very blue. 

“Morning, Thea,” Merlin says. 

He drops a kiss to the top of her head, and they have a whispered conversation on the threshold about someone called Alice who wants toast and gooseberry jam for breakfast. Merlin makes it – she stays where she is, then takes the plate he offers her to the window at the front of the shop. She sets it down in the middle of the ledge, climbs up to join it, scrunching up into the frame and chattering to the air.

“Sorry, did you want some too?” Merlin says, sucking a splodge of jam and crumbs off his finger.

“No, I – ”

“Don’t like gooseberries.”

Gwaine tilts his head in question, but all Merlin does is smile and duck his head.

“Who’s Alice?”

“Thea’s pet field mouse,” Merlin says. Leaning in with a hand on Gwaine’s arm, he whispers: “She’s invisible and easily startled, so don’t be offended she hasn’t said hello yet.” 

“Imaginary friend?”

“Not everyone’s lucky enough to find the real thing. It’s not that unusual. I had a kangaroo.”

His voice softens and his hand loiters, and Gwaine wants to take it, push him back against the door, twine their fingers together above Merlin’s head and kiss sighs out of his mouth. Far too startling for Alice. Gwaine glances between Merlin and Thea, someone else he glimpsed on the castle tour tugging on his thoughts.

“Thea – she looks an awful lot like – ”

“Morgana’s her mother. We were – well, whatever we were, we’re not anymore.”

Merlin goes back to the truffles, looks up with a smile that doesn’t quite crowd out the sadness in his eyes.

“And Thea lives with you full-time?”

“Morgana’s – ” His lips open and close with no word between them, and when he finds another one Gwaine knows it’s not at all the one he really means. “ – difficult. You want to try one?” he says. 

Gwaine nods. Merlin scoops a truffle up off the table like it’s a tiny injured bird. He brings it over, stands close, and looks at Gwaine’s lips. All of Gwaine condenses, as if he’s suddenly shrunken inside his skin, but he opens his mouth, anyway.

Merlin rests the truffle on Gwaine’s tongue. Right next to his ear he talks – hushed – about the recipe, how his mother worked and worked and worked at it, perfected it on the day she died, left him nothing but it, a shop in terrible debt, and her plate. Gwaine wants to ask if the spin of it draws a person’s soul out to sit on their surface, because nothing else explains why he feels this stripped of his body and exposed. 

“Like it?”

“I don’t want to, but yes,” he whispers, and then realises Merlin was talking about the confection. 

Merlin smiles, and Gwaine wants to ask why he stayed when his mother passed in a town that feels like it’s frozen in an age which never quite existed. The only thing Gwaine can think, though, is that the truffle didn’t really taste like chocolate: it tasted like something ethereal and very, very faraway. Something you’re only ever supposed to read about in books with gilt-trimmed pages.

*

Another hotel, this one famed for its oysters and baths which fill from the ceiling like a personal rain cloud or tropical storm. Another restaurant he means to go to, plans forsaken as night sweeps apathy over him. By the light from the quayside, he scratches with a biro:

_You should always be in kitchens. They suit the way you stand. I never knew, before, that watching someone roll a ball of chocolate between their palms can be as fascinating as stories of Jupiter and Mars._

_~~I wish I’d asked you more about your mother and the shop and your imaginary kangaroo.~~ I wish I’d asked you everything about your mother and the shop and your imaginary kangaroo, because it’s clear to me now you wanted someone to tell. For work I draw threads from culture and history and art, make a collage with them to sell a sketch of a place to the wanderlusty – so I can see the vague shape of her, and it, and the kangaroo (she looked like you and thought like you and had your slightly timid gaze when she realised someone was staring right at her; the shop was built up with steel and tears; the kangaroo was a thing to cling to, a hint of the exotic which would brighten even the dingiest place. You love all three of them with equal voracity, I’ll bet), but I’d like the details, still._

_I have so many questions for you, but I shan’t record them. That would be admitting I’ll never get the chance to hear the answers spill out of your mouth, and I can’t bear the black and white of that._

*

Paper lanterns bob in the willows, and Thea’s with Gaius, dancing to the sound of lilting guitar while the river sways and laps up the shore in ripples. Merlin smiles at him through the crowd, disentangles himself from the conversation he was in to come over.

“Wasn’t sure you’d make it,” he says.

“I never miss the chance to crash someone else’s birthday party.”

“Come on,” Merlin says, fingers loosely winding round Gwaine’s wrist. “I’ve something for you.”

He takes Gwaine to a table buckling under gifts. Tall, thin packages in red and gold mingle with the squat and expensive, and Merlin ignores them all and lifts up a tiny lilac box. He holds it out. It’s light as a bird shell between Gwaine’s fingers.

“It’s not my birthday for six months,” he says.

“You’ll have breezed through by then. Open it.”

Gwaine drags the lid free. Inside there’s a nest of purple tissue, and one round coin of chocolate, sprinkled with amethyst flecks. He laughs out his surprise. 

“You got me.”

“You didn’t taste it yet.”

“I know a violet cream when I see one.” Merlin holds his gaze, and Gwaine has that feeling again, of having found something he hadn’t known he was in want of. “Fancy a walk?” he says.

*

The B&B he’s in boasts its own watermill and a thatched roof topped with a pheasant. Gwaine shuts it out in favour of staring at what he wrote on the train ride:

_I’ve spent a lot of nights tangling my limbs with those of strangers. None of them made me want to ask so many questions. None of them made me write about them. ~~None of them made me want to draw a line through my life like the entirety of it is a mistake.~~_

*

They halt on the towpath at the narrowboat he’s renting, and it happens as these things always do, the moment feeling like the right one because above there’s a pretty moon and in the distance burbles the sound of someone else’s birthday, joy they’re together in not being a part of. Merlin’s lips open around slightly too-quick breath, and as Gwaine tastes them his stomach has an odd hollow in it, like this is already over because they broke it with a kiss.

Usually Gwaine would say something, ease the tension with an obvious come-on, but just like he did when they made truffles, Merlin directs it all with his eyes, gets them inside to the thin strip of bed and their clothes undone with nothing but flickers of his gaze. He knows about the cinders, the violets, and the gooseberries, so perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise he knows Gwaine’s flavour preferences here too. He laces his sweetness with just a hint of the sharp: flutters his tongue along Gwaine’s collarbone, holds him with a tug of his hair; and when he pulls Gwaine in to fit behind him – inside him – it’s with five blazing trails of fingernail up his thigh.

After, Gwaine strums the muscles of Merlin’s arm as it rests across his chest.

“Will you tell me how you do it?” Gwaine says. “Guess what people like?”

“It’s not guessing.”

“You were just born with this magical ability?”

At that, Merlin smiles. Gwaine shifts to breathe in the scent of his hair. A hundred curiosities glisten on the edges of his thoughts, but instead of looking directly at them, he draws the nets, and lets the waves lull them to sleep.

*

He doesn’t say goodbye.

He doesn’t stop in the next town.

He doesn’t hanker for a new adventure.

 

In an internet café with orange walls and criminally uncomfortable seating, Gwaine watches the curser blink for nearly three hours before he can type the word _Camelot_.

*

_They say the globe has four corners; I’m sure I’ve seen at least eight. I’ve fallen off buses, been held hostage with political mime, eaten guinea pig, and even taken yage._ Getting some distance, _I used to think, and then I just spiralled out and out further into the world, every place giving me an idea for another, always a signpost pointing at a fresh horizon to chase._

_I crave the oddest things: a pillow the firmness of which isn’t a surprise because I chose it; the smell of washing up liquid (I haven’t done that for years); someone to tell – for no reason but that we tell each other these things – that it’s not the taste of gooseberries but the hairs I don’t like (I expect you’d laugh at that, with the guinea pig and everything). ~~I wish they were generic, these cravings, but they’re not. They’re tied to you.~~_

*

The cobbles are just as steep as Gwaine remembered, and even though he’s only been gone three weeks, the locals look at him like they’ve never seen him before. He looks at nothing but the shop with the unprepossessing red sign. It feels like he’s been walking towards it forever when he pushes open the door.

Hearing the bell, Merlin emerges from the kitchen, a tea towel draped over his shoulder, his hair a mess like he’s been in there all night.

“Oh,” he says, wiping melted chocolate off his fingers. “I thought you’d gone.”

“I came back. I kept thinking about – ”

_You. Cocoa powder on your face and butter somehow having found its way into your hair. Your hands left ghosts on mine. Some days all I could feel was them over my fingers, rolling a truffle through sprinkles, and that’s nothing compared to the rest. Your laughter is indelibly printed on the back of my neck. Your voice is what reads me my thoughts. Your kisses have made the entire world feel faded and all my dreams have the taste of you in them, now._

“ – I kept thinking about staying. Buying a houseboat.”

Merlin’s mouth forms a bunch of different shapes, none of which take.

“You’re a travel writer,” he says. “Is travelling not pretty intrinsic to that?”

“I always wanted to write a novel. I was just waiting for someone worth dedicating it to.”

Merlin’s laugh is quick, disbelieving, and lovely. He dips his chin like that way, Gwaine won’t see the breadth and depth of his smile.

“What are you making?” Gwaine says, with a glance out the back.

“Something new. We were experimenting. Want to help?”

“I’ll even wash up.”

Merlin grins, hooks a finger in the neck of Gwaine’s t-shirt. He pulls him in, kisses him with soft, storybook fervour, then twists the material and, with it, leads him into the kitchen. 

Having run so far and for so long, there’s a flicker of apprehension in Gwaine’s chest. He’s drawn a line through his life, fears the blankness of pages he has to fill with himself. It dulls when he sees the table: a thin film of chocolate spread glossy with a palette knife, bowls full of decadent glazed nuts and a jar full of crystallised violets lined up. Thea’s perched on it too. She swings her heels, chattering to the flat of her palm where Gwaine can picture a small field mouse hiding her face in her thumb. Without looking up she says: 

“Alice is glad you came back.”

*

The stars come up above the willows, and the breeze that would normally have carried Gwaine away drifts on by. They go to Freya’s, eat and talk and touch, pressing stories of hairy gooseberries and imaginary kangaroos onto the bones of each other’s wrist.

It’s very late when Merlin falls asleep. Gwaine sits in the window with his notebook, thinking to write him the poetry of lovers, but the only words that fall from his pen are:

_I don’t know what kind of confection we’re making, but I saw it in the kitchen: all the ingredients are here._


End file.
